K F Olwig
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 14332 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | K F Olwig |
| NOMBRES | K F |
| APELLIDO | Olwig |
| FIRMA | OLWIG K F |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2984-0156 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 58 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 598 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 58 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1980 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
Matrifokalitet
Matrifokalitet: Et antropologisk problembarn eller misforstået modstandskultur?
Documenting Impossible Realities
The End and Ends of Flight. Temporariness, Uncertainty and Meaning in Refugee Life
Refugee studies have emphasised the precarious condition of those who are forced to flee from their 'home' country, yet unable to end their flight by gaining the right to settle in another country. Such concern has generated a critical scholarly narrative of refugees' displacement in a situation of rightless 'permanent temporariness' characterised by uncertainty, stasis and meaninglessness. This analysis of Abdul's story of his refugee life explo…
Landscape, justice and the quality of life in emblematically embodied nation/states – the case of Denmark
The modern notion of the landscape of the nation-state, we argue, emerged in part through an 'emblematic' fusion of the nation, imagined as a bio-organic body-politic, and the state conceptualised in geo-metric terms as the Euclidean, cartographic framework within which that body operates. The eliding of the geo-metric with the bio-organic has influenced national discourse, law and practice by defining the legal and social right to belong within …
The African ‘Other’ as Displaced Enslaved and Refugee
Taking its point of departure in two historically separate legal cases involving the right to care for kin this article compares the perception and treatment of two groups subjected to forced migration—enslaved Africans and their descendants in the former Danish West Indian colonial society and African refugees in present-day Danish welfare society. Drawing on Balibar’s notion of ‘internal borders’ it demonstrates the key role of ‘the Other’ in t…
From Local Community Studies to Migration Research or
Issue Introduction
Biometric technologies using digital representations of bodily characteristics to identify individuals have become an institutionalised method of registering and recognising persons, thereby establishing their right to cross borders. Based on situated ethnographic fieldwork among tech-developers, border police, forensics, IT hacktivists and migrants, this special issue illuminates how biometric technologies are put to use and experienced by the d…
The Right to a Family Life and the Biometric 'Truth' of Family Reunification
Biometric assessment of refugees' applications for family reunification has become standard practice in many countries when 'credible' legal documentation of kin relations is lacking. Studies have criticised biometrics for objectifying families as bio-genetic units as part of a 'new regime of truth' that regards bodies as sources of truth about individuals 'real' identity. This article argues that, while biometric verification poses severe limita…
Epilogue
During one of his recent visits to Denmark the Danish American entertainer Victor Borge was asked by a Danish journalist whether he had considered movieng back home from the United States. At first glance the differing homes identified in the ethnographic case studies represent a bewildering array of seemingly incongruous &s;physical and conceptual spaces where identities are worked on&s;, to use Allison James&s;s expression. The studies range fr…
The Biometric Border World
Since the 1990s, biometric border control has attained key importance throughout Europe. Employing digital images of, for example, fingerprints, DNA, bones, faces or irises, biometric technologies use bodies to identify, categorize and regulate individuals’ cross-border movements. Based on innovative collaborative fieldwork, this book examines how biometrics are developed, put to use and negotiated in key European border sites. It analyses the di…
Female immigration and the ambivalence of dirty care work
It is a generally accepted view that immigrants, especially women, often are relegated to performing the denigrated dirty care work that the local population refuses to do. Studies of Caribbean women who trained and worked as nurses in the post-Second World War British hospitals thus have emphasized that they were especially saddled with tasks involving unclean substances reflective of their racialized, low-status position as immigrants in Britai…
Migration as Adventure
Narratives of adventure constitute a well-established convention of describing travel experiences, yet the significance of this narrative genre in individuals' accounts of their migration and life abroad has been little investigated. Drawing on Simmel and Bakhtin, among others, this article analyses how Caribbean immigrants in Denmark present themselves through narratives of adventure as travellers of the world eager to experience different cultu…
Moving Memories and Memories of Moves
The epilog treats the relationship between movement, memory work and place through three cross-cutting themes in the book’s wide-ranging ethnographic chapters: 1) the significance of the social contexts in which memory work takes place and is seen to gain meaning (national, transnational or local communities, family relations or individual lives); 2) the temporal span of memory work (recent history, life times, generations or distant pasts), and …
Return Migrants’ Experience of Access to Care in Corrupt Healthcare Systems
Equal and universal access to healthcare services is a core priority for a just health system. A key societal determinant seen to create inequality in access to healthcare is corruption in the healthcare system. How return migrants' access to healthcare is affected by corruption is largely unstudied, even though return migrants may be particularly vulnerable to problems related to corruption due to their period of absence from their country of or…
Americas, Sociocultural Overviews
Return Migration among Elderly, Chronically Ill Bosnian Refugees
Elderly migrants constitute a considerable share of global return migration; nevertheless, literature on the health aspects of the return migration among these migrants is still scarce. This study explores the significance of return migration among elderly, chronically ill Bosnian refugees from Denmark and the role of health issues in their decision to return. It is based on semi-structured interviews with 33 elderly, chronically ill Bosnian refu…
Mobility, education and life trajectories
Travel for educational purposes, once the privilege of the upper class, has become a global mass phenomenon in recent years. This special issue examines, within different cultural and historical contexts, the close relationship between migration, education and social mobility. Adopting the perspective that education includes a broad range of formative experiences, the articles explore different educational trajectories and the local, regional and…
Local and transnational care relations
An increasing number of young women from the Global South have become au pairs in the Global North since the turn of the millennium. Through ethnographic analysis of three cases of au pairing in Denmark, involving Filipina and Caribbean women, this article discusses the nature of the local as well as transnational family relations in which these women are embedded as au pairs, and the opportunities and restraints that they present. We use anthrop…
The duplicity of diversity
Diversity' has become a key term in recent years, yet it has been criticized for being a vague concept with different and contradictory meanings. This article demonstrates that there are at least three inherent meanings of the term: (1) discerned difference attributed with positive or negative value; (2) diverting diversity providing pleasure and amusement; and (3) distracting diversity directing attention from something of greater importance. I …
Migrating for a profession
Youths from the Global South migrating for further education often face various forms of discrimination. This Caribbean case study discusses how conditions in the home country can provide a foundation for educational migration that helps the migrants overcome such obstacles and even develop a strong sense of agency and self-empowerment. In the post-WWII period, numerous Caribbean women trained in nursing at British hospitals that have been descri…
Sandra Wallman, The Capability of Places
Notions and practices of difference
The notion of diversity, which has gained increasing prominence in recent years, promises to rejuvenate migration research in terms of the theoretical and methodological lines of enquiry pursued, the empirical data generated and the interpretations and knowledge produced. By pointing to the existence of many possible forms of differentiation and belonging in social life, it offers a productive alternative to the ethnic framing that has characteri…
Climate Change and Human Mobility
The 'successful' return
Research on female migrant caregivers has tended to focus upon the emotional and social problems they encounter working abroad, given women's traditional role as caregivers for their own families. This article analyses how Caribbean women who have returned after a period abroad as domestic workers inscribe their migration experiences within the gendered narrative of the good relative who migrates to help the family left behind and therefore deser…
Children's Sociality
The increasing institutionalization of childhood in Western societies has generated concern in the social sciences regarding the disciplinary and regulating regimes of institutions and their presumed constraints on children's social interaction. This article argues that institutions for children can also enable such social interaction. Drawing on Norbert Elias's proposal that child rearing entails a civilizing project, this article contends that …
Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape
The full complexity of the ideas of landscape and nature has been largely lost due to a modern tendency to appropriate the meaning of landscape to a concept of nature as scenery. The resulting conflation of meaning has not only led to questionable forms of determinism, it has obscured the substantive meaning of landscape, and related concepts, in European and North American culture. This study of the evolving meaning of a key geographical term ad…
Narratives of the children left behind
The long history of population movements in the Caribbean has led to the establishment of globalised families in which diffuse networks of relationships tie migrants and the relatives they leave behind into coherent social fields. Migration studies have documented that migrants often leave children behind with relatives, and that these children constitute pivotal points in the social fields. Yet there has been little focus on the children who gro…
A wedding in the family
Rituals such as weddings and funerals are significant for transnational family networks as events where scattered relatives meet and validate shared kinship and common origins. They are particularly important when taking place at a family 'home' that has been a centre of social and economic relations and locus of emotional attachment. This article analyses a wedding on a Caribbean island involving a large global family network, which occurred at …
Transnational” Socio-Cultural Systems and Ethnographic Research
This article discusses a widespread pattern of migratory moves that is often overlooked in contemporary research on transnational migration. Transnational theory has successfully highlighted the significance of migrants’ attachments to people and places transcending the confines of nation-states. By emphasizing, a priori, the national, this theory tends to overlook the full complexity and meaning of migrants’ extra-local socio-cultural relations.…
The burden of heritage
The cultural construction of the past is of increasing interest to anthropologists, as well as to the people they study. Many of the most forceful and visible expressions of the past are fueled by the so-called heritage movement, which is becoming a worldwide concern, born of an uneasy combination of national ideology, ethnic politics, and tourist industry interests. I explore the cultural politics of heritage in relation to the different ways in…
Integration
After a long history dominated by out-migration, Denmark, Norway and Sweden have, in the past 50 years, become immigration societies. This article compares how these Scandinavian welfare societies have sought to incorporate immigrants and refugees into their national communities. It suggests that, while the countries have adopted disparate policies and ideologies, differences in the actual treatment of and attitudes towards immigrants and refugee…
A proper funeral
On the basis of an ethnographic narrative of the funeral of a Caribbean migrant in Britain, the argument is made that, while 'a Caribbean community' constituted itself through this life-cycle ritual, it comprised a complexity of relations of varying personal significance, historical depth, and geographical dimension. By thus looking at a Caribbean 'community' through the lens of a constitutive ritual act, this analysis raises questions concerning…
The 'successful' return
Research on female migrant caregivers has tended to focus upon the emotional and social problems they encounter working abroad, given women's traditional role as caregivers for their own families. This article analyses how Caribbean women who have returned after a period abroad as domestic workers inscribe their migration experiences within the gendered narrative of the good relative who migrates to help the family left behind and therefore deser…
Caribbean place identity
This paper argues that a useful point of departure for ethnographic research on the Caribbean can be found in the study of constructions of place and the wider patterns of rooted mobility, at various regional scales, which they implicate. This argument is developed through an examination of the emergence of family land on St. John, USVI, as an anchoring point for African-Caribbean people engaged in acts of moving to explore social and economic op…
Cultural Adaptation and Resistance on St. John
This study covers 300 years of St. Johnian history from the plantation economy of the early 1700s through the peasant economy of the late 1800s inclusive of the present tourist-based economy. The author employs archival records as well as field data, arguing that most anthropologists have shied away from supporting their interpretation with historical research . . . her treatment of the impact of tourism is outstanding, demonstrating that the est…
Cultural Adaptation and Resistance on St John
Narrating deglobalization
According to Ulf Hannerz, globalization, viewed as a historic process of increasing interconnectedness, implies the possibility of an opposite process of deglobalization involving a delinking of interconnectedness. This study of Danish engagement in the Danish West Indies, a colony sold to the United States in 1917, exemplifies deglobalization. This case shows that while globalization can be reversed in terms of interconnectedness, it may continu…
Us and Them in Modern Societies
Mobility, education and life trajectories
Travel for educational purposes, once the privilege of the upper class, has become a global mass phenomenon in recent years. This special issue examines, within different cultural and historical contexts, the close relationship between migration, education and social mobility. Adopting the perspective that education includes a broad range of formative experiences, the articles explore different educational trajectories and the local, regional and…
Notions and practices of difference
The notion of diversity, which has gained increasing prominence in recent years, promises to rejuvenate migration research in terms of the theoretical and methodological lines of enquiry pursued, the empirical data generated and the interpretations and knowledge produced. By pointing to the existence of many possible forms of differentiation and belonging in social life, it offers a productive alternative to the ethnic framing that has characteri…
Issue Introduction
Biometric technologies using digital representations of bodily characteristics to identify individuals have become an institutionalised method of registering and recognising persons, thereby establishing their right to cross borders. Based on situated ethnographic fieldwork among tech-developers, border police, forensics, IT hacktivists and migrants, this special issue illuminates how biometric technologies are put to use and experienced by the d…
The Right to a Family Life and the Biometric 'Truth' of Family Reunification
Biometric assessment of refugees' applications for family reunification has become standard practice in many countries when 'credible' legal documentation of kin relations is lacking. Studies have criticised biometrics for objectifying families as bio-genetic units as part of a 'new regime of truth' that regards bodies as sources of truth about individuals 'real' identity. This article argues that, while biometric verification poses severe limita…
Women, 'Matrifocality' and Systems of Exchange
This ethnohistorical case study of the American, formerly Danish West Indian island of St. John examines the position of Afro-American women during a 260 year period from European colonization of the island to the present. It focuses on the system of social reproduction as it has evolved since slavery and the role of women as agents of production and reproduction, as seen against the background of the socio-economic units and exchange networks wi…
The End and Ends of Flight. Temporariness, Uncertainty and Meaning in Refugee Life
Refugee studies have emphasised the precarious condition of those who are forced to flee from their 'home' country, yet unable to end their flight by gaining the right to settle in another country. Such concern has generated a critical scholarly narrative of refugees' displacement in a situation of rightless 'permanent temporariness' characterised by uncertainty, stasis and meaninglessness. This analysis of Abdul's story of his refugee life explo…
Islands as Places of Being and Belonging
Islands, traditionally important units of research and analysis in ethnographic research, have come to be viewed as a problematic unit of analysis, as anthropologists have realized the close integration of island societies within the wider world. This article argues that islands are still useful and fruitful foci of research, if their particular character is explored from an islandic point of view. Through life-story interviews conducted in three…
Defining the national in the transnational
On the basis of a case study of the small Caribbean nation-state of St. Kitts-Nevis, this article discusses the problems of defining a national culture in a former colonial area. It is argued that African-Caribbean culture emerged, to a great extent, in the margins of the colonial regime. During the last century and a half this margin has become extended to involve relations with emigrants who are dispersed over the globe. The cultural traditions…
Female immigration and the ambivalence of dirty care work
It is a generally accepted view that immigrants, especially women, often are relegated to performing the denigrated dirty care work that the local population refuses to do. Studies of Caribbean women who trained and worked as nurses in the post-Second World War British hospitals thus have emphasized that they were especially saddled with tasks involving unclean substances reflective of their racialized, low-status position as immigrants in Britai…
Migration as Adventure
Narratives of adventure constitute a well-established convention of describing travel experiences, yet the significance of this narrative genre in individuals' accounts of their migration and life abroad has been little investigated. Drawing on Simmel and Bakhtin, among others, this article analyses how Caribbean immigrants in Denmark present themselves through narratives of adventure as travellers of the world eager to experience different cultu…
The struggle for respectability
The relationship between the English Methodists and the Afro-Caribbean population was one informed by different cultural frameworks as well as different class interests. The author examines the missionizing activities in the English-speaking Caribbean, in particular Nevis
Caribbean Journeys
National Parks, Tourism, and Local Development
Women, 'Matrifocality' and Systems of Exchange
This ethnohistorical case study of the American, formerly Danish West Indian island of St. John examines the position of Afro-American women during a 260 year period from European colonization of the island to the present. It focuses on the system of social reproduction as it has evolved since slavery and the role of women as agents of production and reproduction, as seen against the background of the socio-economic units and exchange networks wi…
‘Witnesses in spite of themselves’
In his geographical study of Denmark published in 1855–57, E. Erslev regrets that he cannot provide significant information on the Afro-Caribbean population in the Danish West Indies: 'In addition to our description of the way in which the colored inhabitants are occupied on the plantations, it would have been of interest if we had been able to offer an account of the many other distinctive characteristics of their life; but as far as the author …
Slaves and masters on eighteenth‐century St. John
1985). Slaves and masters on eighteenth‐century St. John. Ethnos: Vol. 50, No. 3-4, pp. 214-230
Cultural Adaptation and Resistance on St. John. Three Centuries of Afro-American Life
Cultural Adaptation and Resistance on St. John
This study covers 300 years of St. Johnian history from the plantation economy of the early 1700s through the peasant economy of the late 1800s inclusive of the present tourist-based economy. The author employs archival records as well as field data, arguing that most anthropologists have shied away from supporting their interpretation with historical research . . . her treatment of the impact of tourism is outstanding, demonstrating that the est…
Cultural Adaptation and Resistance on St John
The struggle for respectability
The relationship between the English Methodists and the Afro-Caribbean population was one informed by different cultural frameworks as well as different class interests. The author examines the missionizing activities in the English-speaking Caribbean, in particular Nevis
Defining the national in the transnational
On the basis of a case study of the small Caribbean nation-state of St. Kitts-Nevis, this article discusses the problems of defining a national culture in a former colonial area. It is argued that African-Caribbean culture emerged, to a great extent, in the margins of the colonial regime. During the last century and a half this margin has become extended to involve relations with emigrants who are dispersed over the globe. The cultural traditions…
Us and Them in Modern Societies
Becoming West Indian
"NÅR Kultur SKAL „Bevares" - perspektiver fra et vestindisk projekt
Karen Fog Olwig: When culture is to be „preserved“: perspectives from a West Indian research project At the same time as anthropology has begun to apply a more processual perspective to the study of culture as fluid and changing, many of the „fourth world“ peoples studied by anthropologists have become preoccupied with codifying their culture in the form of aboriginal, authentic traditions which can be preserved from change. This concem with cult…
Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape
The full complexity of the ideas of landscape and nature has been largely lost due to a modern tendency to appropriate the meaning of landscape to a concept of nature as scenery. The resulting conflation of meaning has not only led to questionable forms of determinism, it has obscured the substantive meaning of landscape, and related concepts, in European and North American culture. This study of the evolving meaning of a key geographical term ad…
The Mobile Middle Class
Børn I Vestindiske Familienetværk
Karen Fog Olwig: Children in West Indian Family Networks: Four Life Stories from Nevis Caribbean people often leave their children behind with relatives when they migrate. It is well known that these children play an important structural role as central linchpins in networks of social and economic exchange which take place between the migrants and their family in the community of origin. There is, however, little knowledge of the ways in which ch…
Narratives of the children left behind
The long history of population movements in the Caribbean has led to the establishment of globalised families in which diffuse networks of relationships tie migrants and the relatives they leave behind into coherent social fields. Migration studies have documented that migrants often leave children behind with relatives, and that these children constitute pivotal points in the social fields. Yet there has been little focus on the children who gro…
The burden of heritage
The cultural construction of the past is of increasing interest to anthropologists, as well as to the people they study. Many of the most forceful and visible expressions of the past are fueled by the so-called heritage movement, which is becoming a worldwide concern, born of an uneasy combination of national ideology, ethnic politics, and tourist industry interests. I explore the cultural politics of heritage in relation to the different ways in…
Caribbean place identity
This paper argues that a useful point of departure for ethnographic research on the Caribbean can be found in the study of constructions of place and the wider patterns of rooted mobility, at various regional scales, which they implicate. This argument is developed through an examination of the emergence of family land on St. John, USVI, as an anchoring point for African-Caribbean people engaged in acts of moving to explore social and economic op…
Det etnografiske feltarbejde
A wedding in the family
Rituals such as weddings and funerals are significant for transnational family networks as events where scattered relatives meet and validate shared kinship and common origins. They are particularly important when taking place at a family 'home' that has been a centre of social and economic relations and locus of emotional attachment. This article analyses a wedding on a Caribbean island involving a large global family network, which occurred at …
Work and Migration
Introduction: Mobile Livelihoods: Making a Living in the World Part 1: Mobile Livelihoods - Regional and Historical Perspectives Part 2: Livelihoods Extended Part 3: Livelihoods and the Transnational Return
Transnational” Socio-Cultural Systems and Ethnographic Research
This article discusses a widespread pattern of migratory moves that is often overlooked in contemporary research on transnational migration. Transnational theory has successfully highlighted the significance of migrants’ attachments to people and places transcending the confines of nation-states. By emphasizing, a priori, the national, this theory tends to overlook the full complexity and meaning of migrants’ extra-local socio-cultural relations.…
Martha Brae's Two Histories
Narrating deglobalization
According to Ulf Hannerz, globalization, viewed as a historic process of increasing interconnectedness, implies the possibility of an opposite process of deglobalization involving a delinking of interconnectedness. This study of Danish engagement in the Danish West Indies, a colony sold to the United States in 1917, exemplifies deglobalization. This case shows that while globalization can be reversed in terms of interconnectedness, it may continu…
Karen Fog Olwig
Oprindelse og forbundethed blandt caribiske migranter Migration studies seem to have created a 'hybrid' research object, defined both thematically (as a category of people affected by migration) and in terms of cultural background (as a group of people belonging to a particular 'diasporic' community by virtue of their shared place of origin). Through an ethnographic analysis of the funeral of a Caribbean migrant to England, the article shows that…
Sociology (39 obras) · Political science (30 obras) · Anthropology (22 obras) · Law (21 obras) · Gender Studies (20 obras) · History (20 obras) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics (18 obras) · Geography (18 obras) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (15 obras) · Gender Studies (14 obras)